Metallic gas resistivity measurements and testing of plasma radial expansion models with an exploding wire

G. RODRIGUEZ PRIETO; L. BILBAO

Congreso; 44th EPS Conference on Plasma Physics; 2017

An exploding wire is a physical system were a metallic wire is forced to explode and becameplasma thorough a fast and large electrical current delivered by an external circuit, typicallywith a large capacitor bank able to generate high currents from the voltage applied to them [1].Due to its large history in science [2], it has been used for many scientific endeavours including theobservation of insulator-to-metal transition in deuterium [3]. Also, it has been used before to confirm models about constitutive properties of the metallic plasma generated, as in [4].But to the knowledge of the authors, it never has been used to establish limits to the resistivity of the metallic gas created in the dark pause, when the electrical current drops to almost zero. In this work, the limits for the copper metallic gas resistivity related with the gas temperature are presented, see the figure 1, and the followed method explained. Using the observed radial expansion of the metallic plasma, different dynamical models are also compared.